ADVANCED CONTROL SYSTEMS - DENX

ADVANCED CONTROL SYSTEMS

“Simply advancedTM”

Who we are?

• Serbian company founded in late 2006

• Member & one of the founders of Serbian “Embedded Cluster”

• Fields of expertise:

– Embedded systems

– Industrial automation engineering (Hydro & Thermal Power plants, Sugar industry etc.)

– Electrical power control systems

What we do?

• Platform Development

– Relay protection

– Engineering

– PLC, RTU, SCADA

– Embedded systems

We will talk about…

• Our Xenomai & Linux experiences

– In perspective of our Relay Protection product – PCT210

– Problems, good & bad things

– What do we plan for tomorrow

Structure of PCT platform

Graphical

Configuration

Tool

U S E R

Analog Inputs, Digital Inputs/Outputs

Backplane bus

IO IO IO IO

Measurement

Algorithms

Protection

Algorithms

Disturbance recorder, Event log

HMI

Panel

Higher level services,

Communication, self supervision

SCADA

IEC61850

PCT210

Operator Panel

Digital I/O Analog Inputs

ARM 32-bit CPU

PCT210 – Hardware perspective

EMC certificate

CPU

PCT210 – facts & components

• Relay Protection, scan time 1ms!

• Backplane bus - EtherCAT

• CPU hardware: at91sam9260 (ARM9, 200MHz)

• Modern communication interface: IEC 61850, GOOSE, Ethernet, TCP/IP, RS 485 or RS 232

• Xenomai 2.4.x

• Graphical Programming software – IEDPro

– Generating C code executed in Xenomai environment

EtherCAT

• Daisy chain Ethernet, high data rate

• 20-30us scan time

• On the fly packet processing

• Very deterministic

• IEEE1588 HW support, all modules synchronize with 20ns drift

• Using it “without” big stack

RT design

• EtherCAT is an external interrupt source

• ISR is doing the most of the work (every 1ms)

– Spending almost 50% of the time

• RT user tasks: iec61850, goose, hmi server, disturbance & event recorders

• Linux domain – commands, maintenance

• Xenomai 2.4.x

– rt_pipes & rt_msg_queues for communication

– Extensive use of shared memory

Xenomai – good things

• It works. Perfectly! It gives hard real time performances.

• Community support is great

• Development pace is impressive

Bad things

• ARM9 limitations & problems:

– Expensive context switching (God bless FCSE)

– Shared memory caching problem

• Problems we had:

– Cpu_idle task strange behavior (nohlt is the answer)

For the future

• Xenomai 2.5

– Unlocked context switching

• ARM: at91sam9g20 (400MHz)

• New platform: Intel Tolapai – EP80579

Contact

• Advanced Control Systems d.o.o.Brankova 30, 11000 Belgrade, Serbia

• Phone: +381.11.20.25.550Fax: +381.11.20.25.577E-mail: info@adv-cs.com

http://www.adv-cs.com